Google, Bing & (Yes) Yahoo Buy Tweets From Twitter

Watching the search news yesterday was pretty interesting. First, there were tons of rumors that Microsoft will be integrating Twitter data into Bing. Then the news broke on that where Bing confirmed the news. It launched, in limited form, at bing.com/twitter.

Shortly after, Google also confirmed a deal with Twitter to get their data as well and the news sites went nuts.

Yes, Twitter is licensing out the "firehose" of the tweets to search engines. Bing was doing something like this on a limited basis with Twitter in Bing search on some searches. Yahoo was/is reportedly in similar negotiations with Twitter as well.

In summary, clearly the search engines find the content within Twitter to be valuable. For more on this topic, see the stream of reports from Search Engine Land: